President Obama, reflecting nostalgically on the 2007-2008 Democratic primary, recently praised Hillary to the media:

She had to do everything that I had to do, except, like Ginger Rogers, backwards in heels.  She had to wake up earlier than I did because she had to get her hair done. She had to, you know, handle all the expectations that were placed on her. She had a tougher job throughout that primary than I did.

Backwards in heels?  Is President Obama gay? 🙂 That’s a reason a gay man would give for supporting Hillary: “she does it backwards in heels, just like Ginger Rogers, baby!”.

Does President Obama realize gay men HATED him with a passion in 2007 because they were so pro-Hillary.  I would see them parading down the gay section of Ottawa (bank street) with their pro-Hillary buttons.  You mention Obama to these and they would say “Obama YUCK!”.  I was a huge Obama supporter so I asked one of these why he loved Hillary so much.

“It’s a gay thing, you wouldn’t understand,” he snapped.

“Try me,” I replied.

“Because she’s a diva who wont back down.”

Hillary is indeed a diva who wont back down, which is why in a World exclusive, pumpkinperson.com speculated that Obama is TERRIFIED of Hillary, and shaking in his boots at the prospect of her becoming the next president.

So why is he now almost endorsing her?

In my opinion, and I have no direct evidence of this, Obama was instrumental in getting her embroiled in this whole email scandal, that the FBI is taking quite seriously, but Obama would look like a jerk if the public knew he was trying to sabotage the first female incipient president, so he’s feigning support for Hillary to have plausible deniability if her campaign is derailed. And a lot of pundits are falling for it including, sadly, my hero, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who is normally the sharpest political analyst in America.

Meanwhile gay men who attacked my candidate in 2007-2008, are also now attacking my bro Bernie Sanders.  Hillary’s gay attack dog David Brock has viciously accused this wonderful man of being a racist simply because his recent add included too many whites.

Brock was a hardcore right-wing wacko until he became so impressed by the Diva who wont back down, that he through his own party under the bus to become a Clinton shill, accusing prominent conservatives like Matt Drudge of being secretly gay.  Brock’s gay conservatism, and the gay conservatism he claims to have exposed in others, is consistent with my theory that conservatism is an evolutionary strategy for spreading gay genes.

Last night I couldn’t sleep again so I once again placed my Ipad by my bed and went looking for some conspiracy theory podcast to listen to.  Nothing better then turning off all the lights and listening to paranoid people talk.  In this particular interview, these podcast hosts I’ve never heard of were talking to some self-proclaimed CIA guy I never heard of who was making all these bizare claims about the Obama administration, and how he’s now free to talk because he’s moved to Canada.

I started to fall asleep, and then when I woke up, imagine my surprise when about 22 minutes into the podcast, the self-proclaimed CIA guy is claiming that when Obama was a child, he took the WISC (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children) and obtained an IQ of 128.  Now the WISC was originally normed in 1947.5 and published in 1949.  In 1972, it was substantially revised and renormed, and published as the WISC-R.  It was revised and renormed again in 1989 (WISC-III) and there’ve been a couple versions since then (WISC-IV and WISC V).

Let’s say Obama took the test in 1971 when he was 10.  Then his IQ of 128 needs to be reduced to 121 because IQ test norms become obsolete at a rate of about 0.3 points a year, thanks to the Flynn effect, which was not acknowledged in those days.  On the other hand if he took the WISC-R the year it was released (1974), his IQ would only need to be reduced to 127.

But is this story even true?  In all the years I’ve seen bloggers and their readers obsess about President Obama’s IQ, no one has ever mentioned this stat.   The self-proclaimed CIA guy claims to have got it from the Chinese.  The Chinese government has been known to spy on America, and they are more open to the idea of IQ and HBD than Americans.  Given that there is a lot of racism in Asia, they might have been intrigued by the fact that America had a black president and perhaps they were curious to see if he was dumb enough to take advantage of, and went snooping through his childhood records.

On the other hand, this “CIA guy” might just be making stuff up to get attention.  A lot of the other claims he makes (Obama was born in Kenya, Obama’s dad is Frank Marshall Davis) sound so silly, that it’s hard to believe anything he has to say.  But then I fell asleep again and missed most of the interview.

Normally I don’t get involved in politics, but I must make an exception for the inspirational Bernie Sanders who has emerged as the most admired Jewish man in the entire World in the eyes of Americans:

Even though I admire the millionaires and billionaires who Bernie likes to vilify, the fraud and abuse on Wall Street is reprehensible, and most U.S. politicians are just puppets for the rich.  The U.S. desperately needs campaign finance reform.

Bernie also displays incredible integrity for a politician.  He’s had the same views for decades, he raises money from small individual contributions, not super PACs, he’s run a positive campaign refusing to exploit Hillary’s scandals, and despite being extremely pro-Israel, he opposed the Iraq war and supported the Iran nuclear deal.

However unlike Bernie, I don’t think massive economic inequality is inherently bad, and I disagree with his plans to make college less expensive.  How about making college less necessary?  Now that would be progress.

The SAT is normally taken by the most academically successful third of U.S. 17-year-olds. The two thirds of American teens who don’t take the SAT have either dropped out of high school long before the SAT is given, or they have no plans to go to a selective college.

However in order to convert SAT scores to IQ equivalents, it helps to know how all American teens would do on the SAT if they took it.

In a series of rare little-known studies, the college board gave a short version of the SAT to a representative sample of all American high school juniors and then statistically adjusted the scores to predict how the would have done at 17 (I think). They could have just waited until they were 17, but by then a lot of them would have dropped out of high school, and thus could not be tested.

Here are the results from 1974 (remember, the SAT got a lot easier in April 1995):

One of the first thing we notice is that the distribution is not perfectly Gaussian at the extremes.  For example a verbal score of 650 is at the 99 percentile which on a normal curve, is 2.33 standard deviations (SD) above the mean (IQ 135; U.S. norms), but according to the actual mean and standard deviation (368 and 111 respectively), it’s 2.54 standard deviations above the mean (IQ 138).  That may sound like a trivial difference but it occurs on the math section too.   The normal curve says a math score of 700 (99 percentile) would be 2.33 standard deviations above the mean (IQ 135) but the actual mean and standard deviation put 700 at +2.66 SD (IQ 140).  These differences add up in the composite score.

I suspect this departure from the normal curve is because some kids attend schools that better prepare them for the SAT than others.

Of course at the very, very high end of the SAT you get the opposite problem.  The normal curve under-predicts how rare scores are.  I suspect this happens because normally on the SAT, if you fail an item that is beneath you, you can recover by solving at item that is above your head.  But when there are no items that are above your head, you can’t compensate for silly mistakes with lucky guesses, making perfect scores especially rare.

A lot of experts have a vague understanding of heritability (H²).  They know that heritability is the phenotype correlation between genetic clones randomly separated into different enviornments, but what not even the World’s leading experts on heritability seem to understand is what the H in H² means. They make statements that show they are clueless about which of these three statements is true and why:

H = phenotype-genotype correlation

H > phenotype-genotype correlation

H < phenotype-genotype correlation

A major study found Canada to be the second best country in the entire World behind only Germany, but when it comes to quality of life, Canada ranked #1.  Among the reasons are the stunning beauty.

Enter a caption

Whitehorse, Yukon. Submitted to theweathernetwork.com by Peter Toth.

Whenever I can’t sleep, I turn off the lights, place my Ipad by my bed, and listen to an interview on Youtube.  Last night I was especially lucky to find an interview with Dr. James Fallon that I hadn’t heard before.  You would think if you were a psychopath, it would be a source of great shame, or if psychopaths are shameless, still something you would want to hide to protect your reputation.  So you have to admire Dr. James Fallon for running around the country, telling everyone he’s a psychopath and basking in the attention.

In a way being able to admit you’re a psychopath is the ultimate status symbol; a way of saying, I am so respected, and my position in society is so secure, that I can admit this deep dark secret with impunity because I’m untouchable.

The interview was quite fascinating because renowned autism expert Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen expressed skepticism that Fallon really is a psychopath, suggesting instead he might have Asperger’s.  But Cohen was slapped down by an aspergoid audience member who said that people with the condition can tell when others have Asperger’s and she didn’t get that vibe from Fallon at all.

In the past, I have argued that schizophrenia is the opposite of autism, but Cohen makes a coherent case for why psychopathy is the opposite of autism.

In psychopathy:

Cognitive empathy > emotional empathy

But in autism:

Cognitive empathy < emotional empathy

If I understand correctly, it sounds like cognitive empathy helps make you socially intelligent (you understand what others are feeling), while emotional empathy helps make you a good person (you feel what others are feeling, and thus care).  People who are extremely high on cognitive empathy but extremely low on emotional empathy sound quite dangerous, because they have the social IQ to see your weakness, but are so heartless, they ruthlessly exploit it to their advantage.  By contrast, people who are extremely high on emotional empathy but low on cognitive empathy can be easily exploited, because they want desperately to help everyone, but can’t see who will take advantage of their big hearts.

The reason Cohen doubted Fallon’s psychopathy was that Fallon stated the only people he ever physically hurt (as a youth) were bullies because he was outraged by the injustice.  Cohen felt this was a sign of emotional empathy.  However Fallon said something that everyone seemed to ignore which was that justice was aesthetically pleasing.  What Fallon was saying (in my view) was “it’s not I truly care about justice, it’s just that it’s pretty”

This resonated deeply with me because just as folks mistake Fallon for a non-psychopath because he likes justice, people mistake me for some kind of political conservative because I like capitalism and HBD.  But like Fallon, I like these things, not because they reflect my heart, but because they reflect my aesthetic tastes.  There’s something incredibly beautiful about a linear relationship between IQ and money, there’s something wonderfully symmetrical about a tri-level racial hierarchy,  or the idea that biggest brained people can afford the biggest house.

In a way I am the opposite of Fallon.  I’m a non-psychopath who gets aesthetic pleasure from ideas that are considered evil in our politically correct society.  By contrast, Fallon is a psychopath, who gets aesthetic pleasure from ideas that are intrinsically good.

Commenter chartreuse writes:

great wealth was never a virtue in itself nor a sign of virtuein christendom and only since 1980 in the US.

most people were very suspicious of the super rich in the early 20th c.

chomsky has noted this.

sociopathy the way i use the word is a necessary accompaniment of elite status, unless you’ve inheritied it.

it is the inability to distinguish between what is “appropriate” and what is right and the inability to distinguish social status from virtue.

in this sense almost every one is a sociopath. and this explains why things like nazi germany and the stalinist soviet union can happen.

two fundamental truths:

1. the norms, conventions, mores, and institutions of a society stand or fall not by the opinions of its members in general but by the opinions of its power elite, which is always a tiny minority.

2. every human society’s power elite is “selected” such that the elite is composed of exactly those people who either:

a. most agree with the status quo, have internalized the ruling ideology….socipaths in my sense of the word.

OR

b. are sociopaths…in the psychiatric sense…who believe nothing and are always faking for their own benefit, that is, those for whom dissembling is as natural as telling the truth.

if you listened to the chomsky vid i posted last, he says…

whatever your native ability, if you think the system you live in is shit you’ll wind up “driving a cab”…and no conspiracy is required…it’s simply the nature of human societies.

chomsky admits that he faked it until he got tenure, but that most people simply can’t endure the bullshit…that he is a rare exception.

The problem with arguing that people at the top are sociopaths is it comes across as sour grapes:  They’re not richer and more powerful than me because they’re better than I am, they got there by being monsters.

But the problem with arguing that people at the top are better than we are, is you come across as a pathetic sycophantic doormat, who worships the very elites who exploit you.

So as a wannabe scientist, I decided to look at the data.  I found research showing that while 1% of the general population is sociopathic enough to be considered a psychopath (an arbitrary cutoff point), 4% of top executives are. This implies that with reference to the general U.S. population,  top executives have a normalized Z score of +0.6 in psychopathy.

I estimate that only about one in 600 American middle aged adults become as rich or powerful as the top executives in this study.  In other words, people with a normalized Z of +2.93 in money/power, have a normalized Z of +0.6 in psychopathy.  Assuming a bivariate normal distribution which is roughly linear to the extremes (the default assumption in my view) this implies the correlation between money/power and psychopathy is 0.20 (0.6/2.93).  But since the measure of psychopathy in the study was quite crude (a check list not a brain scan), which probably only correlates 0.7 with true psychopathy, the true correlation is probably something like 0.2/0.7 = 0.29.

So your average self-made billionaire (an astonishing +4.87 normalized Z in income) might be +4.87(0.29) = +1.41 in psychopathy.  The average self-made U.S. president (a stratospheric +5.4 in self-made power) might be +5.4(0.29) = +1.57 in psychopathy.

In other words, the average self-made U.S. president would be more psychopathic than 95% of Americans, but there would likely be a bell curve, with some self-made presidents being absolute monsters, and a small minority being less psychopathic than the average American.  Historians have ranked Jimmy Carter as perhaps the least psychopathic president and found that even among presidents, certain psychopathic traits positively correlate with job performance.  Of the first 43 U.S. presidents, the following were ranked highest on certain psychopathic traits according to a study by Lilienfeld et al. (2012):

1. Theodore Roosevelt
2. John F. Kennedy
3. Franklin D. Roosevelt
4. Ronald Reagan
5. Rutherford B. Hayes
6. Zachary Taylor
7. Bill Clinton
8. Martin Van Buren
9. Andrew Jackson
10. George W. Bush

Leading psychopathy expert James Fallon (you got to love this guy because not only does he study psychopath, but he actually admits to being one, at least biologically, yet continues to be a respected academic) explains which historical leaders were and were not psychopaths.

[Update Jan 29, 2016: an earlier version of this article included scores beside each president, but these were removed because they were being misinterpreted.]

For some reason many people believe that the old SAT (pre-April 1995) was a much better measure of IQ than the new SAT (post-April 1995).  I started believing this too when I found research showing high SAT people regressed much more to the mean on the new SAT than on the old SAT.  However this evening I read that the correlation between the old SAT and the new SAT is virtually identical to parallel forms of the old SAT, so the trend I noticed was probably just statistical noise.

The reason people think the new SAT is less like an IQ test than the old SAT is that originally the SAT was explicitly intended to be like an IQ test, the hope being to give opportunity to bright people from socially deprived homes who wouldn’t be able to attend a good college without a test of natural ability.  However as IQ tests became more and more politically incorrect, the test makers wanted to distance themselves from IQ, so the test became increasingly about what you learned in school, and less about abstract reasoning.

However what made the SAT correlate with IQ was never the fact that anyone was trying to create an IQ test, it was the fact that the skills you need in college (reading and math) are closely linked to cognitive ability.

A similar case was when David Wechsler created the WAIS explicitly to measure intelligence, but created the WIAT, specifically to measure academic achievement.  I doubt he was trying to make the WIAT a measure of intelligence, since he had already created an IQ test; the point of the WIAT must have been to show clinically significant differences between the two constructs, allowing the diagnosis of learning disabilities.  And yet a recent study found nearly a 0.9 correlation between the two tests.

I don’t know what the general U.S. correlation between the SAT and IQ is because there’s never been (to my knowledge) a study that correlated the SAT with IQ in a sample of ALL Americans (not just the college bound elite).  All the studies I’ve seen involved students at the same school, sometimes with correction for range restriction (which can be misleading because students at the same school are range restricted on more than just test scores).  I have tried to estimate the correlation in the general U.S. population indirectly, by seeing how much samples of high SAT folks  regress to the mean of all Americans, but the results have been inconsistent.

Some here believe that the correlation between IQ and SAT is so high that the SAT should be called an IQ test.  However the brilliant Chris Langan understood the value of verbal precision, and argued that not even the Mega Test, on which he earned the World record should be called an IQ test.  In a landmark 1998 article, Langan wrote:

To avoid the problem of rendering a specific a priori definition of what any such test will measure, it suffices to create a generic alternative description covering all tests which differ in structure or protocol from ordinary IQ tests, and for which high positive correlation with IQ has not yet been established. This new term must refer to a measurable quantity that is specific to the tests it describes, and that may or may not equate to that which is measured by garden variety IQ tests.

Lion of the Blogosphere posted about this shocking headline in the New York Daily News:

I’m not a supporter of Ted Cruz, I’m rooting for Bernie Sanders (the most admired Jewish man in America, and Wall Street’s worst nightmare), but this cover is so utterly obscene, it risks proving Cruz’s point about New York values being crude and disgusting.  Ever since 9/11 New York has had this attitude that they’re the heart and soul of America, but to millions of Americans in the heart land, not to mention millions of people around the World, New York is a vulgarity circus.   When many people think of New York values, they think of Howard Stern’s bathroom humor and Joe Pesci in Goodfellas

You would think New Yorkers would be humble about this, but when someone points it out to them they react with vitriol.

Ted Cruz scored nearly perfect on the LSAT, suggesting an IQ equivalent of nearly 150 (higher than any U.S. president in well over a century) and you can tell from watching him debate that he has an incredible working memory capacity and working memory speed (two traits highly related to IQ).

But ultimately, intelligence is the mental ability to adapt, so how does Cruz turn this around to his advantage?

He could say:

The elite liberal New York media can attack me all they want.  I’m honored that they hate me.  I’m running for real American values, not New York neocon values that got us into wars in the Middle East and push masturbation and bathroom humor into the homes of traditional families.  New York elites are a bunch of pretentious status whoring snobs, and regular New Yorkers are the kind of freaks you see on shows like Welcome Back, Kotter:

He could then start handing out bumper stickers and T-shirts that say “I hate New York and love Ted Cruz”.

And if he really wants to get under Trump’s skin, he could say :

I’m a super smart guy, and I can tell you, Donald Trump is the dumbest billionaire in America.  I can’t think of any billionaire in the country with a lower IQ, which is not surprising since he inherited much of his money rather than earning it like working Americans in the heart land.  In fact, is he a billionaire at all?

Trump prides himself in being both brilliant (a Wharton grad) and rich (a billionaire) so if Cruz attacked him in both areas, Trump would go absolutely ballistic, and Trump could be pressured to release confidential test scores and financial statements, putting him on the defensive.  This is exactly what Trump might do if he were running against himself.

However all of this would backfire unless Cruz could find a way to get to Trump’s right on immigration, which is the reason so many Republicans worship Trump.  If Cruz is as smart as his test scores imply, he would promise to cut down on legal immigration (which even Trump supports).

We know Ted Cruz has the brains to compete, but does he have the courage?

[Update January 16, 2016:  Blogger The Audacious Epigone argues in the comment section of this post that Trump only inherited 1% of his current net worth which Forbes puts at $4.5 billion; an estimate Epigone considers conservative]